Buying Your Business Gifts Via A Promotional Merchandise Programme Might Not Be Good For Some Companies
Many major companies now prefer to put out tenders for a single supplier for their Promotional Items rather than use a number of different business gift suppliers. The reasons for doing this are many and a well run tender for the supply of promotional items can save a company a great deal of expense over the course of a year.
Controlling the supply of promotional items is a good reason for using the tender process because once it is in place you determine who buys what products from whom at at how much. It also means that you can agree terms in relation to service level agreements rebates etc.
Any corporation who allows the procurement of goods such as leather conference folders or promotional bttled water is wasting a lot of money. The reason is that untrained an unskilled buyers tend to keep going back to an original supplier and never look at alternative cheaper sources of supply. These suppliers may even send in a few inexpensive gifts to the buyers every year in an effort to persuade them to stay with them. These free promotional gifts are often sponsored by the manufacturers and given to the distributors free so there is nothing illegal in people accepting them as long as it is not against company policy.
In the case of promotional clothing such as Printed T-shirts or embroidered polo shirts for example you could have as many as 20 people in large organisations buying them. The problem is that every single one of them are probably paying repeat origination charges every time. An origination charge for embroidery could be as much as £50 and for silk screen printing £30 per colour. This means that every time each of them put in an order for these goods or any other Promotional Merchandise with a 4 colour logo for that matter they are paying around £170, if you multiply that by twenty buyers that gives you £3,400 so if they buy say three times a year a large corporation could be spending over £10,000 on origination costs that would come free of charge form one supplier.
Promotional merchandise tenders offer the opportunity for proper service level agreements to be set up. These are usually standard conditions with any supplier who trades in a professional way. But a company setting up a single source supplier for their Promotional Products or come to that for any other sorts of products, can make more stringent demands on these service levels if it feels it necessary. Financial rebates will also usually form part of the service level agreements with money being returned based upon annual expenditure.
If you do decide to go ahead with a tender you should contact a few promotional merchandise suppliers first and ask them for details of well run tenders they have already completed. This will undoubtedly save you a great deal of time further along in the process as a poorly constructed tender wastes a good deal of time for both the company setting the tender up and the suppliers who are tendering for the business. Experience in running full promotional merchandise programmes is essential so make sure you choose a company that can demonstrate lots of expertise in that area.
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